The growth of corporate Internet traffic and inter-office applications using the Ethernet protocol, such as intranets, email, voice over IP and videoconferencing, has created challenges for service providers and operators of Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). Furthermore, data networks are still not optimized to carry traditional telephony or real-time broadcast video applications efficiently.
Carriers are still relying on their extensive deployment of Synchronous Digital Network (SDN) rings to transport traffic in MANs. Consequently, synchronous data transmission over fiber optic networks continues to be the premier transport infrastructure in WANs and MANs.
SONET and SDH are a set of related standards for synchronous data transmission over fiber optic networks. SONET is short for Synchronous Optical NETwork and SDH is an acronym for Synchronous Digital Hierarchy. SONET is the United States version of the standard published by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). SDH is the international version of the standard published by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
Carriers and enterprises need effective means of transporting Ethernet data over Synchronous Data (SD) networks. The most economical and least complicated solution to the problem of running Ethernet traffic over a SD network is through the deployment of interface converters. These devices offer simple connection between LANs and the access network to provide an Ethernet over SDN (EoSDN) solution.
EoSDN provides the scalable robust transport of Ethernet over a dedicated SDN link. Essentially, it seeks to overlay a ‘bursty flexible’ data service over a fixed SDN data pipe. However, this provides inherent issues not realised before with traditional SDN services. These issues include the inability to ascertain whether the SDN link is over/under subscribed by the applied data service.